Sunday, December 04, 2011 2:45:33 AM
Building a Better Mitt Romney-Bot
At the Peterborough Town House in New Hampshire last month.
Marvin Orellana for The New York Times
This time around, Romney's staying in his comfort zone.
Top: Charlie Neibergall/Associated Press. Bottom: Marvin Orellana for The New York Times.
A Romney supporter from New Hampshire.
Marvin Orellana for The New York Times
By ROBERT DRAPER
Published: November 30, 2011
“Your story about dust regulation captures my interest,” Mitt Romney said to the farmer, sounding as if he actually meant it. It was a late October afternoon in Treynor, Iowa, the setting for one of those campaign meta-events at which a presidential candidate enjoys a casual moment with real people that is in fact carefully staged and dutifully broadcast by multitudes of local and national reporters hovering a few feet away. In this instance, Romney was participating in a round-table discussion with a dozen local businessmen — his kind of folks — and exhibiting his teacher’s-pet flair for spewing out entrepreneurial minutiae.
He peppered them with questions. To an energy producer: “High sulfur or low sulfur content? And how clean is the system you’re able to employ? Do you have a trading system for SOx and NOx?” To a feedlot operator, Romney inquired about the number of heads of cattle and their intended purpose. And while discussing renewable energy with an ethanol C.E.O., the candidate offered up a modest smile and said: “When I was a boy, the kind of numbers — help me with my memory on this — but an acre could produce 60 bushels of corn. And now it’s about 160 bushels of corn, is that about right?”
“Governor, I’m sorry, but we’re running a little short on time,” Romney’s advance director, Will Ritter, cut in a few minutes later.
“O.K., I’ll be a little bit shorter,” the candidate promised. Nonetheless, all of this unscripted, free-enterprise small talk cohered into a larger point — indeed, it was the point, the message, the Tao of Mitt, if you will — and in case anyone failed to see it, the candidate spelled it out during the round-table discussion: “I can only tell you this from spending 25 years in business: I understand business.”
That same day, the local organizers had planned press availability with Romney. But the national campaign nixed the idea — just as it had long dispensed with the freewheeling “Ask Mitt Anything” Q. and A.’s, some 200 of which the candidate subjected himself to during the 2008 campaign. “You can’t control the message,” one of Romney’s senior advisers later explained to me. “But at a business round table, it’s much more easily controlled because you’re having a group of businessmen, and you’re talking about the economy and the challenges that they may be facing, and Mitt is very conversant on those points.”
Similarly, this adviser went on, Romney’s five sons, who were ubiquitous features of the previous campaign — and whose affluent preppiness was the subject of much snarky commentary — would be far less present this time around. “The campaign’s interest and focus is on the economy message, not so much on showing the entire dimension of the family.” He went on, “It just doesn’t fit.” After the eldest Romney boy, Tagg, was teasingly invited in a Twitter post to “tailgate for the next debate” by the daughters of Jon Huntsman, “he wanted to Tweet with the Huntsman girls,” said the adviser. Smiling faintly, the adviser added, “No Tweeting.”
Mitt Romney’s campaign has decided upon a rather novel approach to winning the presidency. It has taken a smart and highly qualified but largely colorless candidate and made him exquisitely one-dimensional: All-Business Man, the world’s most boring superhero. In the recent past, aspirants and their running mates have struggled to clear the regular-guy bar. Dan Quayle lacked a sense of struggle; Michael Dukakis couldn’t emote even when asked what he would do if his wife were raped and murdered; George H. W. Bush seemed befuddled by a grocery-store scanner; John Kerry was a windsurfer; John McCain couldn’t count all of his houses.
Romney, a socially awkward Mormon with squishy conservative credentials and a reported worth in the range of $190 million to $250 million, is betting that in 2012, recession-weary voters want a fixer, not a B.F.F. As the Romney campaign’s chief strategist, Stuart Stevens, told me: “The economy is overwhelmingly the issue. Our whole campaign is premised on the idea that this is a referendum on Obama, the economy is a disaster and Obama is uniquely blocked from being able to talk about jobs.”
Meanwhile, Romney has been the race’s putative front-runner from the outset. It’s true that a low ceiling of support has loomed over him for months, while Republicans have anxiously searched all corners for an alternative. Nonetheless, his challengers appear to be self-immolating one by one and have done little to warrant his attention. Whenever Romney does step out of his tightly circumscribed “I understand business” framework, it is to appeal to conservatives by attacking the president’s dubious appreciation of capitalism — saying that Obama “fails to understand America,” that he regards the United States as “just another country with a flag” and that he takes his inspiration “from the socialist Democrats of Europe.”
I heard Romney make the last two comments during recent campaign stops in Iowa, where the first Republican contest will take place Jan. 3. In a clear reversal of previous election cycles, a Bloomberg poll last month indicated that 71 percent of Iowa Republicans polled viewed fiscal concerns as the predominant issue. Iowa is there for Romney to win. The same poll showed Herman Cain with 20 percent support, Ron Paul with 19 percent, Romney with 18 percent and Newt Gingrich with 17 percent. (In recent weeks, Gingrich has risen, following Perry’s and Cain’s reigns as candidate of the moment.) The statistical dead heat reveals that this time around, the social conservatives who tend to predominate at the Iowa caucuses — and who view Romney with deep distrust — have yet to coalesce around a particular favorite, as they did with the former Arkansas governor and Baptist preacher Mike Huckabee in 2008. Back then, Huckabee benefited from an unexpectedly high turnout, taking 34 percent of the vote to Romney’s 25 percent.
In this year’s muddled field, his staff believes that he could win with his totals from 2008. They also believe that he doesn’t have to win Iowa — that he could take second or even third and then move on to New Hampshire, where he maintains a summer home and is considered a heavy favorite. Amid a flawed and far less financially endowed field, Romney’s staff has every reason to believe that he could effectively clinch the nomination in less than a month, after the Florida primary on Jan. 31.
There’s a far less favorable possibility, of course, and it, too, begins with the Iowa contest, which the Romney campaign views with great wariness, as if it might be some kind of sting operation. Despite the obvious rewards of going all in and delivering an early knockout blow in Iowa, Romney’s advisers do not want to risk ginning up expectations that their candidate may again fail to meet. Even worse, they fear that he will reanimate the image of him as a flip-flopper willing to tell the state’s conservatives whatever they wish to hear, which in turn will dog him into New Hampshire and beyond as it did the last time around. As Doug Gross, the 2008 Romney campaign’s Iowa chairman, told me: “He tried to be somebody he wasn’t. That’s why he lost.”
The spin Romney himself puts on his minimalist approach is that after nearly four years of nonstop campaigning, “people know me pretty well.” And yet the unintended signal sent by his narrow casting is that the less said about Mitt Romney, the better. Obama’s strategists ran an entire presidential campaign through the affecting tapestry of his own narrative. Romney — who has written two books, both scantily personal — maintains an uneasy distance from his own life story, steeped as it is in privilege, Mormonism and the murky art of political compromise. His avoidance of these subjects does not mean that they will go away, only that his opponents will have an opening to frame them as they wish.
Still, it may well be that this strategy of underwhelming force ends up fitting perfectly with a pervasive sense of disillusionment with the once-dazzling Obama. In the aftermath of failed romance with the One, perhaps the electorate will come to settle on Mitt Romney as the One Who Won’t Break Your Heart.
The unmarked three-story waterfront building at 585 Commercial Street at the base of the Charlestown Bridge in Boston’s North End seems more aptly suited for a numbers racket than for Mitt Romney’s campaign headquarters. In 2007, during Romney’s previous campaign, burglars (apparently unaffiliated politically) broke in and made off with several computers. Plans to demolish the vacant structure and replace it with condominiums were forestalled, allowing the Romneyites to move back in last year. This fall, a group of Occupy Boston protesters brought nearby traffic to a standstill but were unaware of the building’s inhabitants and left it unharassed.
The equally bleak panorama inside — grimy industrial carpet, halfhearted wall adornments and the occasional piece of paper taped to a door announcing that the person inside is in charge of “Strategy” or some such — is a testament both to a campaign’s tunnel vision and to the fact that the wealthy Romney is a rather tightfisted fellow. (For a time, he elected to save money at his PAC headquarters in Lexington by not installing land lines, even though cellphones did not work inside the building.) Particularly unkempt is the corner office on the second floor, with its clutter of unused exercise equipment, mislaid cups of espresso and a blender half-full of yesterday’s purple energy drink. Its occupant is the Romney campaign’s chief strategist, Stuart Stevens.
Stevens, a 58-year old Mississippi native (whom I have known for over a decade), is as wry, eclectic and mussed in appearance as his boss is earnest and buttoned up. Stevens has skied the North Pole, run successful campaigns in Albania and the Democratic Republic of Congo and assisted Vice President Dick Cheney in his debate preparation against John Edwards in 2004. He wrote an early episode of the hit TV series “Northern Exposure” and consulted on Hollywood projects (including the movie “The Ides of March”) with the politics junkie George Clooney, who after spending considerable time in Washington finally agreed with Stevens’s contention that it is the most sexless city in America. Though Stevens’s customary facial expression is the faintly smiling, middle-distance squint of someone lost in abstraction, he can be direct and combative in the extreme and has the reputation, as a prominent G.O.P. consultant who admires Stevens’s talent put it, of one who “does not play well with others.”
Stevens gravitates toward nonideological Republicans — his client list has included Bob Dole, Charlie Crist and another former G.O.P. governor of Massachusetts, William Weld — and hoped to run Romney’s 2002 gubernatorial campaign. But he was beaten out by Mike Murphy, an equally colorful strategist (the two dislike each other). In the summer of 2007, after defecting with his business partner, Russ Schriefer, from the McCain campaign to produce ads for the Romney team, Stevens found that he had joined an already top-heavy staff — and that Murphy, among others, had already laid out a jumble of messaging strategies. As one Romney adviser now concedes: “We brought on a lot of people because we didn’t know what we didn’t know. We were new to the national stage, and we wanted as much input and advice as we could get, and we also wanted to demonstrate to the world that we could win that invisible primary. So we had a lot of voices, and they weren’t unanimous on every point.”
Even Romney, for whom heaven is an eternal round-table discussion, came to recognize that the proliferation of highly paid consultants had reached the point of diminishing returns. This time around, he has pared down his front office. Still onboard are a few old hands; one of them, Beth Myers, told Romney that the 2008 campaign lacked a single day-to-day strategist — and that for 2012, Stuart Stevens should be that person.
Stevens and his partner, Schriefer, have instilled focus in a campaign that previously seemed a bit grasping. Gone is the weighty Romney entourage as well as the lavish ad buys, which always struck Stevens as presumptuous. (A favorite Stevens axiom: “If you don’t enter this process humbly, you will leave it humbly.”) Though he does not seem terribly intimidated by Romney’s Republican opponents — to Stevens, Rick Perry brings to mind the townies in the early scenes of “The Deer Hunter” who go loping into Vietnam expecting to kick butt — he refers to the Obama team as “the best campaign organization ever put together” and reminds his colleagues, “The only thing more intoxicating than getting elected president is the terror of losing the power of the White House. They’ll fight savagely to hang onto that power.”
Stevens devised the campaign’s refrain “Obama Isn’t Working,” with its dreary recession visuals and testimonials from the jobless posted on a Romney Web site. The strategist’s gift for withering criticism is rubbing off on his boss. Though Romney now and again employs distinctly Mitt-like language when referring to the president as a “well-intentioned” man who’s simply “out of his depth,” the candidate increasingly cleaves to the more jut-jawed message that Obama has “failed America” and doesn’t get “what makes America work” — which segues to the virtues of the übercapitalist Romney, whose new campaign slogan is “Believe in America.”
In the meantime, Stevens and other advisers have counseled Romney to ignore attacks from disapproving conservatives, like the comment made by the Baptist pastor and Perry supporter Robert Jeffress that “Mormonism is a cult.” (“Four years ago, that would have set off all sorts of alarm bells — we would have tried to mobilize our evangelical supporters to counter what Jeffress and others have been saying,” a senior staff member told me.) Romney has quietly courted key figures in the Tea Party movement since its inception two years ago: among his PAC’s first donations was one to the Congressional campaign of Michele Bachmann; he was the first major figure to endorse the current South Carolina governor, Nikki Haley; and he also gave to the losing campaigns of Sharron Angle of Nevada and Christine O’Donnell of Delaware.
But the Romney campaign has made its peace with — and in the general election may make a virtue out of — the fact that he remains despised by the far right. Among this segment is Iowa’s most prominent Tea Party activist, Ryan Rhodes, who told me that Romney’s campaign has not reached out to him and who also said, “You look at his health care plan, the fact that he hired people who lobbied for Solyndra — it takes those issues off the table that you could tie around Obama’s neck.” He went on: “I don’t think he has a major belief system. He’s Mitt Romney. He’s a manager, O.K.?”
In the past, Romney, an English major in college, was reluctant to let others put words in his mouth. But those running his campaign felt that his prose tended to accentuate Romney’s blandness and wasn’t a good use of his time. (“During the 2008 campaign,” one staff member says, snickering, “I used to tell people: ‘We’re not very happy with our speechwriter, and we want to fire him. His name’s Mitt, and he works on the third floor.’ ”) Stevens, who has made a second career out of writing dialogue for recurring TV characters, persuaded Romney to surrender the speechwriting responsibilities to him — and in recent weeks, Stevens in turn has deferred to the punchy prose of Lindsay Hayes, a former speechwriter for Sarah Palin.
Stevens has also played a hand in Romney’s much-lauded debate performances, which have buttressed the candidate’s assertion that he is best equipped to take on the rhetorically deft Obama. The previous campaign’s debate sessions were, says one adviser, “like an Economics 101 course in college, just a lot of people sitting auditorium-style with their computers.” This year’s prepping has involved fewer contributors conjuring sound bites. “All we do is argue,” says Stevens, who has coached Romney to not get entangled in the specifics of a question. Instead: Hear the topic, zone out the rest, say what you’re about, don’t get hung up on how the crowd responds. It’s not about the room. It’s about the answer.
Another Stevens maxim is “You’ve got to dig the ditch you’re going to die in” — or, less metaphorically, “You have to be willing to lose,” a slogan that he and Schriefer inscribed on a message board early on in the campaign. It’s a rousing sentiment that Romney has taken to heart in his forceful defense of the Massachusetts health care law that some admirers have begged the ex-governor to disavow. During such moments, Romney seems to project the confident air of a chief executive who spends little time fretting over what other people think.
More often, however, Mitt Romney the data-driven former corporate consultant seems like a man puzzling his way to victory, doing and saying whatever might solve the problem immediately at hand. In Iowa, I watched as the candidate confronted the dicey issue of ethanol subsidies at the Treynor business round table like a man who had no intentions of losing, dying, ditch-digging or anything else except ingratiating. First he stipulated that “I supported the subsidy of ethanol to help get the industry on its feet.” After qualifying that support by saying, “I didn’t feel the subsidy needed to go on forever,” Romney noted that the subsidy was due to expire in December anyway. He qualified that observation by remarking, “I might’ve looked at more of a decline over time. . . .” But, he cheerfully observed, “most people I know in the ethanol industry say, ‘Fine — we’re now up and going.’ ” Lest anyone doubt his commitment, Romney reminded his audience, “For me, ethanol is part of national security — it is part of America developing our own energy. . . . And I would like to see the ethanol industry continue to be successful to grow and to provide a growing share of America’s domestic energy sources.
“And how to do that,” he finished with an unsteady grin, “as Ross Perot used to say, I’m all ears!”
Among Stevens’s colorful analogies, the unlikeliest is one in which he compares Romney to Michael Vick, the dynamic quarterback of the Philadelphia Eagles. “Michael Vick’s not a real good pocket guy,” Stevens told me. “So don’t tell him he can’t roll out. Try to make him the best rollout guy that’s ever played.” And indeed, Romney’s staff has endeavored to focus the campaign on his strengths, which are decidedly the opposite of Vick’s. So instead of letting their quarterback roam and improvise, they’re keeping him tightly contained in the business-centric pocket, hoping to God that he does not stray from it.
Romney has been spending a great deal of time lately with Republicans who want to like him. On Oct. 26, he met with 61 Republican members of Congress who had either already endorsed him or were considering doing so. “The thing I try to convey to my colleagues is, ‘Mitt Romney is not going to embarrass you — he’s the most vetted candidate out there,’ ” says Representative Jason Chaffetz of Utah, who helped organize the gathering. In that sense, Romney did not disappoint. Though he devoted the bulk of his talk to the economy, he also made the point, Chaffetz says, “that in the general election he’s going to be very attractive to both Republicans and independents.”
Still, one attendee was annoyed when Romney gave a lengthy explanation for his conversion on the abortion issue and then concluded with the stilted formulation, “I come down on the side of pro-life.” The representative confronted Romney and said, “That’s not going to work with my rural voters.”
Another congressman, Darrell Issa of California, offered the former Massachusetts governor a suggestion. “Instead of always telling people this is what you’re going to do, tell them how you did it,” Issa said. “Like when you had a budget deficit and went through it line by line with each department head — that really resonates with people who go through their own budgets line by line. It’s more personal.”
Romney considered the idea, then carefully said, “I’m going to have to figure out how to do that.” Implicit in his response was that Romney’s four years dealing with the Democrat-controlled Massachusetts State Legislature — one in which the governor showed himself to be, as one adviser puts it, “a conciliator” and “a practical politician” — is a story best left for the general election. (Or avoided entirely. As another Romney campaign strategist observes, “It’s a terrible time to be running based on your experience in government.”)
Later that afternoon, Romney met with two House Republican leaders: Paul Ryan, the Budget Committee chairman, and Kevin McCarthy, the majority whip. Romney wanted to discuss Medicare reform with Ryan, who says he encouraged the candidate to “be bold, be specific and defend yourself.” The plan Romney would unveil a week later — one that allows future senior citizens to choose between traditional Medicare and a private health insurance plan — amounts to a compromise proposal that Ryan acknowledges is politically safer than his, and which he is “perfectly comfortable with.”
McCarthy also counseled boldness. “Look, no candidate ever wants to have a primary challenge, but it always makes you stronger,” the majority whip told Romney. He added, “You’ve got to have that Reagan-and-the-microphone moment.” (He was referring to the 1980 debate in which the candidate Reagan proclaimed, “I am paying for this microphone,” appearing decisive.) “People are just starving for a leader,” McCarthy said.
Hearing such stories, you get the notion that Republicans yearning for victory are calling out for something brilliant and yet unseen to burst out of Romney’s gray chrysalis. Simultaneously earthbound and, as one Republican congresswoman puts it, “a little too perfect,” Romney seems, even to himself, an ill fit for his newly chosen vocation. While trying to win over voters in New Hampshire in early 2008, he turned to an aide and said: “You know, I’ve done a lot of stuff. I’ve started companies, I ran companies, I ran the Olympics. This is by far the hardest thing I’ve ever done!” He added, laughing, “Why didn’t anybody tell me?”
The chief vulnerability of the Romney campaign resides with the understandable decision to keep their anti-Michael Vick in the pocket, thereby limiting our view of the man. Those who at close range watched Romney’s failure to close the deal in 2008 did not witness a rejection per se. Instead, it appeared that Republican voters could not quite envision this decent, clever and socially uneasy fellow governing their country — as opposed to, say, managing their stock portfolios. Stories of Romney’s wooden people skills are legion. “The Mormon’s never going to win the who-do-you-want-to-have-a-beer-with contest,” concedes one adviser, while another acknowledges, “He’s never had the experience of sitting in a bar, and like, talking.”
To his admiring subordinates, Romney is the man who, while waiting in an aide’s garage during an advertising shoot, took it upon himself to sweep it spick-and-span. He is the boss who hosted a 2008 post-mortem at his house in Belmont, Mass., and instead of demanding answers or fixing blame, passed out photo albums of the campaign for each staff member to keep. One longtime aide maintains that Romney is, no matter how much of a corporate barracuda the Democrats make him out to be, “more Richie Cunningham of ‘Happy Days’ than Gordon Gekko” of “Wall Street.” And he possesses an almost otherworldly unflappability — seen, for example, on a public street in 2009, when a detractor who recognized Romney cursed at him.“Well!” remarked Romney to a companion. “I guess somebody’s having a bad day!”
Romney’s associates maintain that his genial and humble aspect masks a voracious intellect. A longtime friend of Romney’s explained to me that a desire to digest all available viewpoints was the thread that ran through the candidate’s entire professional life. At Bain Capital, said the friend, Romney “wanted hardworking people who would challenge him — he plays devil’s advocate, trying not only to understand what you think the answer is but what your depth of thinking is.” While turning around the troubled Winter Olympics in Utah, “he brought in a management team with divergent views.” As governor, Romney “wanted a cabinet that would argue different points of view.”
The friend then hastened to assure me that Romney was, beyond all that discursiveness, a decisive leader. But as a presidential candidate, he does not always display his intellectual rigor in his policy proposals. An adviser once told me about how in 2007 Romney reacted to the news that the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was planning on visiting ground zero during a United Nations convention. First, the candidate engaged in a debate with his foreign-policy aide, Dan Senor. Then the two men switched sides and argued opposite positions. Finally, Romney called for someone to bring him the United Nations Charter, which he read and discussed at length with Senor.
But in the end, Romney’s response to the Ahmadinejad visit was unremarkable. He released a four-sentence press statement denouncing the Iranian leader’s intentions as “shockingly audacious” and concluding that rather than “entertaining Ahmadinejad, we should be indicting him.”
I asked the campaign staff if I could talk to Romney about his economic proposals. They replied that in the interests of controlling the campaign’s message, the candidate would not be participating in any profiles or “process stories.” Instead, they suggested I speak with the campaign’s policy director, Lanhee Chen, a highly respected Harvard Ph.D., who did his best to characterize Romney’s views. The problem is that when you look beneath Mitt Romney’s critique of the Obama economy, his remedies feel a bit thin.
Asked what President Romney would have done during his first days in office, in lieu of a federal stimulus, to address the market meltdown, Chen rattled off a few likely options: “Lowering the corporate tax rate. Enacting a permanent extension of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts. Immediately ratifying our pending trade agreements with Colombia, Panama and South Korea. In the energy sector, freeing up the necessary land to enable greater domestic production.” He did not make clear how Romney would have steered these boilerplate conservative proposals through a Democrat-controlled Congress.
I asked Chen about Romney’s recent recommendation that the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment of the Arts be targeted for federal spending cuts. Was the candidate proposing that these two federal agencies, long opposed by conservative groups, be eliminated altogether? “We haven’t specifically discussed that,” Chen said.
These programs had a combined annual budget of less than $500 million. Meanwhile, Romney previously criticized President George W. Bush’s Medicare Part D prescription-drug program for its exorbitant cost — “the actual balance-sheet impact . . . [is] now estimated to be approximately $8 trillion,” he wrote. Had Romney discussed repealing the pricey entitlement? “It was not under consideration,” Chen replied.
Romney’s policy director had thorough responses to about half of my inquiries. He didn’t know if the candidate’s heavy criticism of Obama’s “green jobs” initiatives meant that Romney was skeptical of a green-jobs industry on its face. He didn’t know what exemptions Romney would eliminate in pursuit of a flatter tax code. Asked if Romney agreed with Michele Bachmann’s sentiment that every adult American should pay taxes, Chen replied, “I don’t have anything for you there.” Finally, I asked for clarification of a remark I heard Romney make on the campaign trail in western Iowa: “You cannot have a strong economy without strong families and strong values.” While I could appreciate how that sentiment would appeal to Iowa’s social conservatives, the logic wasn’t especially clear.
“You know, it’s a general comment on the importance that strong families have in our country’s economic strength,” Chen said. He recalled that Romney expanded on the topic at the Values Voters Summit a few weeks back and referred me to the speech.
Here is what it says on the subject: “The foundation needed for a strong economy and a strong military is a people of strong values.”
Romney’s newest book, “No Apology,” similarly represents how the candidate’s intellectual vigor gives ground to political calibrations. Romney decided to write the book immediately after bowing out of the race in February 2008. “I can live with everything that happened in the campaign,” he told aides. What frustrated him was his inability to articulate a vision for the country. Two advisers recall a meeting in the summer of 2008 at which Romney cited as a literary inspiration a book that had been on his mind, about the decline of France following the mass protests of the 1960s — and then proceeded to translate it aloud from French.
While touring the country raising funds for Republican candidates that summer, Romney also pored over texts from British leftists arguing why America’s decline as a superpower should be welcomed. He told aides to thrash out big ideas for the book, and he envisioned gathering roomfuls of experts. After first hiring a ghostwriter, Romney then decided that he would prefer to write it himself. He spent most of the first half of 2009 at his new home in La Jolla, Calif., typing away on his laptop while e-mailing his researcher for details on radical Islam and the fall of the Roman Empire.
For those political insiders who had been hearing murmurs that Romney was intending to write a “Tom Friedman-esque” book, it came as something of a surprise to read “No Apology” — a data-packed but mostly familiar defense of American exceptionalism that, as the title indicates, also devotes ample space to condemning President Obama’s supposed tendency to apologize on the world stage for America’s moral lapses. Where Romney’s book strikes an unusual chord, for a politician anyway, is in its frank recognition that for innovation to thrive, governments must stand back and allow the “creative destruction” of obsolete industries — and the jobs they produce. Readers will recognize in such passages the brisk realism of Mitt Romney, corporate consultant.
Squaring such sentiments with the Mitt Romney who won the Michigan primary in January 2008 is more vexing. More than one adviser told me that Michigan was where Romney “found his voice” — an odd claim, given the widespread view at the time that the primary featured Mitt Romney at his most pandering. While the front-runner, McCain, delivered “straight talk” that some industries in Michigan were unlikely to be rejuvenated and that worker retraining was the more prudent course than trying to “recreate the past” — an argument for creative destruction — Romney labeled his opponent a defeatist and sunnily pledged “to fight for every single job.” (Ten months later, Romney returned to his Bain mind-set and wrote an Op-Ed in The New York Times titled, “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt [ http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/19/opinion/19romney.html (next item below)].”)
Another side of Mitt Romney is ever-so-briefly revealed in “No Apology” — that of a former lay pastor, or “stake president,” at his Mormon church in Boston. Serving in that capacity, Romney wrote, “I cannot count the number of times I consoled or counseled a person who had lost a job.” In a couple of short but moving paragraphs, the author recites a few such poignant moments before concluding, “Ever since these experiences, unemployment is not merely a statistic for me.” Sheryl Gay Stolberg independently confirmed Romney’s counseling interactions in an article in this paper [ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/16/us/politics/for-romney-a-role-of-faith-and-authority.html (second item below)]. But Romney refused to be interviewed on the subject, and his campaign staff also declined to assist Stolberg, just as my inquiries on his time as Mormon stake president were, unlike my queries on other subjects, met with silence.
“He’s probably taken it off the table because he feels that the downside of bringing up his Mormon leadership responsibility is greater than his upside,” says Doug Cropper, a Romney supporter and Mormon bishop in Davenport, Iowa. “And I understand it.”
The unintended consequence is that it leaves less of Mitt Romney to understand — and, correspondingly, more room for doubt.
It’s very unlikely that we’ll ever hear Mitt Romney and Barack Obama openly discuss the things they have in common. Nonetheless, we may well see in the general election a contest between two dispassionate and accommodating pragmatists and skilled debaters who relish intellectual give-and-take, and whose willingness to compromise has infuriated the party faithful. Both have promised change. Each will frame the other as being not up to the task.
How ably Romney the nominee will defend himself, given the kid-gloves treatment by his current competition and the campaign’s avoidance of large segments of his own life story, is difficult to say just yet. In early November I watched Romney return to Iowa for only the fourth time. He stopped in Dubuque and Davenport and, before decent-size crowds, essentially regurgitated his address on the economy from the week before. In both cases he spoke for less than 20 minutes and did not take questions from the audience. Far more of his ground time was devoted to filming promotional material in a Dubuque sheet-metal factory, where the footage would capture the candidate seeming engaged in the kind of heart-to-heart dialogues with working-class Americans that the campaign had otherwise left off his schedule that day.
Near the end of his talk in Davenport, he said to the 275 east Iowans in attendance, “I want you to get to know me a little better.” After wrapping up his speech, he moved briskly through the crowd, pausing now and then to take photos and sign autographs, before flying out of Iowa with Stuart Stevens and a couple of other staff members.
The following morning in Des Moines, I met with Romney’s former Iowa chairman, Doug Gross. The strategist recalled how he had gotten off to a rocky start with the Romneys when he first traveled to Boston to meet them in the spring of 2007. That day, Gross brought up Romney’s potential liabilities in Iowa — including his previously progressive stances on abortion and gays, along with his Mormon faith — and warned that he would have to prove that he could relate to average voters. According to Gross (and confirmed by someone else who was there): “He got mad, his wife stormed out and he never talked to me the rest of the night. They found it insulting.”
Romney nonetheless hired Gross, who believes that the results of that 2008 campaign vindicated his initial concerns. Despite being asked to rejoin the campaign this year, he has not done so. I asked him if he had any reservations as to whether Mitt Romney would be a good president.
“Yeah,” he immediately replied. “That’s why I haven’t committed. To be an excellent president — part of the rap on Mitt is that he’s too flexible. I see that as a good thing, because it shows he’s willing to be pragmatic and do what works.
“But,” added Mitt Romney’s former Iowa chairman, “I don’t know if he’s got the gut instinct to make the right call at the right time. I don’t know yet.”
Robert Draper is a contributing writer for the magazine. He is working on a book about the House of Representatives.
Editor: Ilena Silverman
© 2011 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/04/magazine/mitt-romney-bot.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/04/magazine/mitt-romney-bot.html?pagewanted=all ] [with comments]
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Let Detroit Go Bankrupt
Ronald J. Cala II
By MITT ROMNEY
Published: November 18, 2008
Boston
IF General Motors, Ford and Chrysler get the bailout that their chief executives asked for yesterday, you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye. It won’t go overnight, but its demise will be virtually guaranteed.
Without that bailout, Detroit will need to drastically restructure itself. With it, the automakers will stay the course — the suicidal course of declining market shares, insurmountable labor and retiree burdens, technology atrophy, product inferiority and never-ending job losses. Detroit needs a turnaround, not a check.
I love cars, American cars. I was born in Detroit, the son of an auto chief executive. In 1954, my dad, George Romney, was tapped to run American Motors when its president suddenly died. The company itself was on life support — banks were threatening to deal it a death blow. The stock collapsed. I watched Dad work to turn the company around — and years later at business school, they were still talking about it. From the lessons of that turnaround, and from my own experiences, I have several prescriptions for Detroit’s automakers.
First, their huge disadvantage in costs relative to foreign brands must be eliminated. That means new labor agreements to align pay and benefits to match those of workers at competitors like BMW, Honda, Nissan and Toyota. Furthermore, retiree benefits must be reduced so that the total burden per auto for domestic makers is not higher than that of foreign producers.
That extra burden is estimated to be more than $2,000 per car. Think what that means: Ford, for example, needs to cut $2,000 worth of features and quality out of its Taurus to compete with Toyota’s Avalon. Of course the Avalon feels like a better product — it has $2,000 more put into it. Considering this disadvantage, Detroit has done a remarkable job of designing and engineering its cars. But if this cost penalty persists, any bailout will only delay the inevitable.
Second, management as is must go. New faces should be recruited from unrelated industries — from companies widely respected for excellence in marketing, innovation, creativity and labor relations.
The new management must work with labor leaders to see that the enmity between labor and management comes to an end. This division is a holdover from the early years of the last century, when unions brought workers job security and better wages and benefits. But as Walter Reuther, the former head of the United Automobile Workers, said to my father, “Getting more and more pay for less and less work is a dead-end street.”
You don’t have to look far for industries with unions that went down that road. Companies in the 21st century cannot perpetuate the destructive labor relations of the 20th. This will mean a new direction for the U.A.W., profit sharing or stock grants to all employees and a change in Big Three management culture.
The need for collaboration will mean accepting sanity in salaries and perks. At American Motors, my dad cut his pay and that of his executive team, he bought stock in the company, and he went out to factories to talk to workers directly. Get rid of the planes, the executive dining rooms — all the symbols that breed resentment among the hundreds of thousands who will also be sacrificing to keep the companies afloat.
Investments must be made for the future. No more focus on quarterly earnings or the kind of short-term stock appreciation that means quick riches for executives with options. Manage with an eye on cash flow, balance sheets and long-term appreciation. Invest in truly competitive products and innovative technologies — especially fuel-saving designs — that may not arrive for years. Starving research and development is like eating the seed corn.
Just as important to the future of American carmakers is the sales force. When sales are down, you don’t want to lose the only people who can get them to grow. So don’t fire the best dealers, and don’t crush them with new financial or performance demands they can’t meet.
It is not wrong to ask for government help, but the automakers should come up with a win-win proposition. I believe the federal government should invest substantially more in basic research — on new energy sources, fuel-economy technology, materials science and the like — that will ultimately benefit the automotive industry, along with many others. I believe Washington should raise energy research spending to $20 billion a year, from the $4 billion that is spent today. The research could be done at universities, at research labs and even through public-private collaboration. The federal government should also rectify the imbedded tax penalties that favor foreign carmakers.
But don’t ask Washington to give shareholders and bondholders a free pass — they bet on management and they lost.
The American auto industry is vital to our national interest as an employer and as a hub for manufacturing. A managed bankruptcy may be the only path to the fundamental restructuring the industry needs. It would permit the companies to shed excess labor, pension and real estate costs. The federal government should provide guarantees for post-bankruptcy financing and assure car buyers that their warranties are not at risk.
In a managed bankruptcy, the federal government would propel newly competitive and viable automakers, rather than seal their fate with a bailout check.
Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, was a candidate for this year’s Republican presidential nomination.
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/19/opinion/19romney.html [comments at http://community.nytimes.com/article/comments/2008/11/19/opinion/19romney.html ]
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For Romney, a Role of Faith and Authority
The Mormon Temple in Belmont, Mass. When initial plans in 1996 called for a larger structure, incensed neighbors filed suit. Mitt Romney tried to smooth relations between the church and the town.
Evan McGlinn for The New York Times
Mitt Romney was a Mormon leader before politics.
Boston Globe
Bryce Clark said Mr. Romney was a thoughtful and compassionate leader.
Michael Friberg for The New York Times
Judy Dushku had a different take on Mr. Romney's leadership and said she she saw hypocrisy and callousness.
Evan McGlinn for The New York Times
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
Published: October 15, 2011
BELMONT, Mass. — In ticking off his credentials on the campaign trail — management consultant, businessman, governor — Mitt Romney omits what may have been his most distinctive post: Mormon lay leader, offering pastoral guidance on all manner of human affairs from marriage to divorce, abortion, adoption, addiction, unemployment and even business disputes.
Bryce Clark was a recipient of Mr. Romney’s spiritual advice. Late one summer night in 1993, distraught over his descent into alcoholism and drug use, Mr. Clark, then a 19-year-old college student, decided to confess that he had strayed from his Mormon faith. So he drove through this well-heeled Boston suburb to Mr. Romney’s secluded seven-bedroom home.
As the highest-ranking Mormon leader in Boston, Mr. Romney was responsible for determining whether Mr. Clark was spiritually fit for a mission, a rite of passage for young Mormon men. Mr. Clark had previously lied to him, insisting that he was eligible to go. But instead of condemnation that night, Mr. Clark said, Mr. Romney offered counsel that the younger man has clung to for years.
“He told me that, as human beings, our work isn’t measured by taking the sum of our good deeds and the sum of our bad deeds and seeing how things even out,” recalled Mr. Clark, now 37, sober and working as a filmmaker in Utah. “He said, ‘The only thing you need to think about is: Are you trying to improve, are you trying to do better? And if you are, then you’re a saint.’ ”
That encounter with Mr. Clark provides a rare glimpse into the way Mr. Romney — now a Republican candidate for president — expresses his faith and exercised authority as a religious leader. From 1981 through 1994, he was a powerful figure in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which is run almost entirely by volunteers beyond its headquarters in Salt Lake City.
First as bishop of his own congregation, and later as Boston “stake president,” overseeing a region akin to a Roman Catholic diocese, he operated as clergyman, organization man and defender of the faith, guiding the church through a tumultuous period of rapid growth.
He confronted anti-Mormon sentiment and management challenges, supervising youth programs, the church’s social welfare system, missionary training and outreach to Hispanic, Portuguese and Southeast Asian converts, including Cambodian and Laotian refugees whose teenagers were joining the church in droves.
Later, when his official duties were complete, he contributed handsomely to the construction of the grand — and controversial — Boston Temple, high on a hilltop in Belmont, its steeple topped by a golden angel, just minutes from the Romney home. “Mitt’s Temple,” some local residents called it derisively.
Some Mormons, like Mr. Clark, found Mr. Romney thoughtful and compassionate; one mother recalled his kindness to her dying son. Others, including a group of Mormon feminists demanding a greater role for women, found him condescending, doctrinaire or just plain bossy. He clashed with a married mother of four who sought to terminate a pregnancy; the incident made news years later, when Mr. Romney ran for United States Senate as a supporter of abortion rights — a position he has since abandoned.
“Mitt is the type who liked to be called Bishop Romney or President Romney,” said Judy Dushku, a professor of government at Suffolk University in Boston and a Mormon feminist leader. “He is very conscious of his place in the hierarchy, but not yours.”
Mr. Romney declined to be interviewed for this article. Facing a primary electorate in which Christian conservatives are a powerful force, he is trying to keep his religion from becoming a barrier to his election. When his faith has become an issue — a Texas pastor supporting a rival candidate recently proclaimed Mormonism “a cult” — Mr. Romney has not offered a full-throated defense, but instead called for civility.
But here in Belmont, where Mormons estimate their population at 500 in a town of 25,000, Mr. Romney’s fellow congregants, many of them professionals and academics, are accustomed to hearing him talk of his beliefs. Mr. Romney has traded his large home for a townhouse; just a few months ago, he stepped to the lectern during a Sunday service to deliver what Tony Kimball, a retired professor of government, called a “traditional Mormon testimony,” in which he proclaimed his faith in Jesus as his savior.
Mr. Kimball, a close aide when Mr. Romney was stake president, says culture, rather than political calculus, may keep candidate Romney from talking about faith. “It’s kind of considered bad form by a lot of Mormons to wear it on your lapel,” he said, “and Mitt is not that way.”
Deep Church Roots
Mr. Romney has an impeccable Mormon pedigree. His family traces its church lineage to 1837; a great-great-grandfather, Miles Romney, began following the first Mormon prophet, Joseph Smith, that year, and later trekked to Utah with the early Mormon pioneers. As son of one of the nation’s most prominent Mormons — George W. Romney, a former Michigan governor and presidential candidate — Mitt Romney seemed destined for a prominent position in the church.
In 1971, Mr. Romney arrived in Boston to attend a joint program at the Harvard Business and Law Schools. He had completed a Mormon mission in France, graduated from Brigham Young University and was already married with a son. On weekends, he and other young Mormons would take overnight bus trips to the nearest Mormon temple, outside Washington, to perform sacred rituals, like baptism for the dead.
“Most of us would yak or sleep on the bus, or read a book,” recalled one of the participants, Helen Claire Sievers. “Mitt was always working.”
It was an early hint of the intensity and business acumen that would make Mr. Romney rich as the founder of Bain Capital, a Boston-based private equity firm. He used those same skills, in salesmanship, deal making, organization, networking and public relations, as a steward of the church.
He was highly motivated and “hands-on,” said Philip Barlow, a professor at Utah State University, who as a graduate student was one of Mr. Romney’s top aides as bishop. If somebody’s roof leaked, Mr. Romney would show up with a ladder to fix it. Mr. Barlow remembers Mr. Romney picking butternut squash and yanking weeds on the church’s communal farm.
When young Southeast Asian converts began joining gangs, Mr. Romney set up small storefront churches in rough areas of town, with the hope of drawing them back. When the approach did not work, he shut the branches down. Every other Sunday, he convened his high council — akin to a president’s cabinet — to discuss operational matters.
“He would run it like a business, and he would listen to us,” said Mick Watson, a Brandeis University graduate school dean and one of the councilors. “But Mitt, of course, was in charge — he was always in charge.”
That take-charge attitude sometimes rankled in a setting where people yearned for consensus.
Ron Scott, a journalist and Mormon who has written a forthcoming biography of Mr. Romney, remembered how, when he moved to Boston, Mr. Romney asked him to run public affairs for the church — and then proceeded to tell him precisely how to do the job. “He had more of an imperious approach,” Mr. Scott said. “He wanted to direct everything.”
Yet he proved himself an effective salesman for his faith. Shortly after he became bishop, at age 34, with five young sons, the church announced plans for a new meetinghouse in Belmont, on a wooded, 14-acre plot. Townspeople were suspicious. “The tenor was, ‘The Mormons are moving in,’ ” said Grant Bennett, who succeeded Mr. Romney as bishop. In 1984, with the construction almost complete, the meetinghouse burned down. Officials suspected arson.
Soon Mr. Romney was flooded with offers from other churches wanting to lend their buildings. Sensing an opportunity to strengthen community ties, he accepted them all, and the Mormons of Belmont rotated from one house of worship to another for a year while theirs was being rebuilt.
It was not the last time Mr. Romney would try to smooth church-town relations. In 1996, church leaders in Salt Lake announced plans for a granite temple — 94,000 square feet with six soaring spires — on a hilltop adjacent to the Belmont meetinghouse. (Unlike Mormon meetinghouses, Mormon temples are reserved for sacred ceremonies, and non-Mormons may step no farther than the lobby.) Incensed neighbors filed suit.
Mr. Romney, fearing he would become a lightning rod after his Senate loss to Edward M. Kennedy in 1994, kept a relatively low profile. He and his wife, Ann, hosted meetings in their home so the neighbors could meet the architects, and perhaps sort their differences out. He spoke in favor of the project at a public hearing. His tithe — Mormons are expected to give the church 10 percent of their income — helped foot the $30 million bill.
But mostly, said Scott Ferson, a public relations executive (and former Kennedy aide) who helped calm tensions, Mr. Romney functioned as high-level adviser, a liaison between Boston and Salt Lake. The project was eventually built, albeit on a smaller scale.
“He was kind of a Big Mormon,” Mr. Ferson said of Mr. Romney. “A lot of people would say, ‘Let’s see what Mitt thinks.’ ”
Hewing the Line
As a Senate candidate, Mr. Romney angered higher-ups in Salt Lake with his independent stance on abortion; he said that he was personally opposed, but favored laws allowing women to choose. But earlier as a church leader, he hewed much more closely to the official Mormon view.
Mormons oppose abortion, except in extreme cases like rape, incest or where the life of the woman is in danger — and require that church elders be consulted. In 1990, Exponent II, a Mormon feminist magazine that Ms. Dushku, the Suffolk University professor, helped found, published an article by a married mother of four who recounted her own experience after doctors advised her to terminate her pregnancy when she was being treated for a potentially dangerous blood clot.
Her bishop got wind of the situation, she wrote, and showed up unannounced at the hospital, warning her sternly not to go forward. The article did not identify Mr. Romney as the bishop, but Ms. Dushku later did.
Now the woman has come forward, identifying herself in Mr. Scott’s book as Carrel Hilton Sheldon. (Through Ms. Dushku, she declined to be interviewed.) “Mitt has many, many winning qualities,” she is quoted as saying, “but at the time he was blind to me as a human being.”
Ms. Dushku sees hypocrisy and callousness; Mr. Scott sees inexperience.
“I don’t think he’s an evil, unfeeling, uncaring kind of guy,” Mr. Scott said. “He was a brand new bishop, he was pretty young to begin with, my sense is he was pretty full of himself, and he thought that he would not fulfill his obligation as bishop if he didn’t press the matter.”
But if Mr. Romney was blind in that instance, his time as an ecclesiastical leader may have also opened his eyes. Having been raised in wealth and privilege, he was now exposed to hardship and human suffering, especially among Boston’s immigrant populations. “I had no idea people lived this way,” Mr. Barlow recalls him saying.
A Reserved Demeanor
Ted Oparowski, a retired firefighter, and his wife, Pat, a secretary, still praise Mr. Romney for ministering to their 14-year-old son, David, who was dying of cancer three decades ago.
The boy, upon hearing that Mr. Romney was a lawyer, asked him to help draft a will, so that he might leave something to each of his friends. Mr. Romney pulled out a legal pad, and together they wrote one up. Later, he gave the eulogy at the boy’s funeral.
If Mr. Romney, who no longer holds an official church title, seems overly polished or wooden on the campaign trail, his defenders say that is just how he is, reserved yet caring. “He’s always been that way, that’s his demeanor,” Mrs. Oparowski said.
Because the church imposes such heavy volunteer obligations on its members, much of Mr. Romney’s work involved functioning as a cheerleader to keep things up and running. When a congregant asked to be released from his church duties during a difficult divorce, Mr. Romney said no; he did not want to send a message that divorced people could not serve.
When Clayton Christensen, a Harvard business professor, and his wife, Christine, felt overwhelmed by church obligations, Mr. Romney showed up unexpectedly at the door. With three young children, Mr. Christensen was in charge of missionary work; his wife ran the relief society, ministering to Boston’s poor.
“He said, ‘I was just driving home from work, and I had a feeling that I needed to stop by and tell you that God loves you.’ ” Mr. Christensen was so moved, he recalled, that he wept.
On the night in 1993 that Mr. Clark, the filmmaker, arrived at the Romney home here, Mr. Romney greeted him in a white business shirt, dress slacks and bedroom slippers. He was waiting at the door; the young man’s parents had called ahead.
The Clarks and the Romneys had been close for years — Mr. Clark’s father, Kim, now president of Brigham Young University’s campus in Rexburg, Idaho, was then dean of the Harvard Business School — and Mr. Romney had been the family’s “home teacher.” For nearly a decade, he made monthly visits to the Clark home, checking on the family’s welfare and serving up Gospel lessons to the seven Clark children.
The Romney house, Mr. Clark remembers, was quiet. Mr. Romney ushered him into the library, and they spoke for more than an hour. “He talked a lot about the Savior, and what the atonement means,” Mr. Clark said. “He said, ‘I just want you to know you are not alone.’ ”
In the months and years that followed, Mr. Romney wrote the young man notes of encouragement, frequently reminding him of what he had said that summer night, about always “trying to improve.” Mr. Clark says he still has them.
Kitty Bennett contributed research.
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Related
For Romney, Social Issues Pose New Test (October 9, 2011)
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/us/politics/social-issues-pose-new-test-for-mitt-romney.html
First: Asking Candidates Tougher Questions About Faith (August 28, 2011)
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/28/magazine/asking-candidates-tougher-questions-about-faith.html
What Is It About Mormonism? (January 6, 2008)
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/magazine/06mormonism-t.html
Related in Opinion
Room For Debate: Are Republicans Ready Now for a Mormon President?
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/07/04/are-republicans-ready-now-for-a-mormon-president
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© 2011 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/16/us/politics/for-romney-a-role-of-faith-and-authority.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/16/us/politics/for-romney-a-role-of-faith-and-authority.html?pagewanted=all ]
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At the Peterborough Town House in New Hampshire last month.
Marvin Orellana for The New York Times
This time around, Romney's staying in his comfort zone.
Top: Charlie Neibergall/Associated Press. Bottom: Marvin Orellana for The New York Times.
A Romney supporter from New Hampshire.
Marvin Orellana for The New York Times
By ROBERT DRAPER
Published: November 30, 2011
“Your story about dust regulation captures my interest,” Mitt Romney said to the farmer, sounding as if he actually meant it. It was a late October afternoon in Treynor, Iowa, the setting for one of those campaign meta-events at which a presidential candidate enjoys a casual moment with real people that is in fact carefully staged and dutifully broadcast by multitudes of local and national reporters hovering a few feet away. In this instance, Romney was participating in a round-table discussion with a dozen local businessmen — his kind of folks — and exhibiting his teacher’s-pet flair for spewing out entrepreneurial minutiae.
He peppered them with questions. To an energy producer: “High sulfur or low sulfur content? And how clean is the system you’re able to employ? Do you have a trading system for SOx and NOx?” To a feedlot operator, Romney inquired about the number of heads of cattle and their intended purpose. And while discussing renewable energy with an ethanol C.E.O., the candidate offered up a modest smile and said: “When I was a boy, the kind of numbers — help me with my memory on this — but an acre could produce 60 bushels of corn. And now it’s about 160 bushels of corn, is that about right?”
“Governor, I’m sorry, but we’re running a little short on time,” Romney’s advance director, Will Ritter, cut in a few minutes later.
“O.K., I’ll be a little bit shorter,” the candidate promised. Nonetheless, all of this unscripted, free-enterprise small talk cohered into a larger point — indeed, it was the point, the message, the Tao of Mitt, if you will — and in case anyone failed to see it, the candidate spelled it out during the round-table discussion: “I can only tell you this from spending 25 years in business: I understand business.”
That same day, the local organizers had planned press availability with Romney. But the national campaign nixed the idea — just as it had long dispensed with the freewheeling “Ask Mitt Anything” Q. and A.’s, some 200 of which the candidate subjected himself to during the 2008 campaign. “You can’t control the message,” one of Romney’s senior advisers later explained to me. “But at a business round table, it’s much more easily controlled because you’re having a group of businessmen, and you’re talking about the economy and the challenges that they may be facing, and Mitt is very conversant on those points.”
Similarly, this adviser went on, Romney’s five sons, who were ubiquitous features of the previous campaign — and whose affluent preppiness was the subject of much snarky commentary — would be far less present this time around. “The campaign’s interest and focus is on the economy message, not so much on showing the entire dimension of the family.” He went on, “It just doesn’t fit.” After the eldest Romney boy, Tagg, was teasingly invited in a Twitter post to “tailgate for the next debate” by the daughters of Jon Huntsman, “he wanted to Tweet with the Huntsman girls,” said the adviser. Smiling faintly, the adviser added, “No Tweeting.”
Mitt Romney’s campaign has decided upon a rather novel approach to winning the presidency. It has taken a smart and highly qualified but largely colorless candidate and made him exquisitely one-dimensional: All-Business Man, the world’s most boring superhero. In the recent past, aspirants and their running mates have struggled to clear the regular-guy bar. Dan Quayle lacked a sense of struggle; Michael Dukakis couldn’t emote even when asked what he would do if his wife were raped and murdered; George H. W. Bush seemed befuddled by a grocery-store scanner; John Kerry was a windsurfer; John McCain couldn’t count all of his houses.
Romney, a socially awkward Mormon with squishy conservative credentials and a reported worth in the range of $190 million to $250 million, is betting that in 2012, recession-weary voters want a fixer, not a B.F.F. As the Romney campaign’s chief strategist, Stuart Stevens, told me: “The economy is overwhelmingly the issue. Our whole campaign is premised on the idea that this is a referendum on Obama, the economy is a disaster and Obama is uniquely blocked from being able to talk about jobs.”
Meanwhile, Romney has been the race’s putative front-runner from the outset. It’s true that a low ceiling of support has loomed over him for months, while Republicans have anxiously searched all corners for an alternative. Nonetheless, his challengers appear to be self-immolating one by one and have done little to warrant his attention. Whenever Romney does step out of his tightly circumscribed “I understand business” framework, it is to appeal to conservatives by attacking the president’s dubious appreciation of capitalism — saying that Obama “fails to understand America,” that he regards the United States as “just another country with a flag” and that he takes his inspiration “from the socialist Democrats of Europe.”
I heard Romney make the last two comments during recent campaign stops in Iowa, where the first Republican contest will take place Jan. 3. In a clear reversal of previous election cycles, a Bloomberg poll last month indicated that 71 percent of Iowa Republicans polled viewed fiscal concerns as the predominant issue. Iowa is there for Romney to win. The same poll showed Herman Cain with 20 percent support, Ron Paul with 19 percent, Romney with 18 percent and Newt Gingrich with 17 percent. (In recent weeks, Gingrich has risen, following Perry’s and Cain’s reigns as candidate of the moment.) The statistical dead heat reveals that this time around, the social conservatives who tend to predominate at the Iowa caucuses — and who view Romney with deep distrust — have yet to coalesce around a particular favorite, as they did with the former Arkansas governor and Baptist preacher Mike Huckabee in 2008. Back then, Huckabee benefited from an unexpectedly high turnout, taking 34 percent of the vote to Romney’s 25 percent.
In this year’s muddled field, his staff believes that he could win with his totals from 2008. They also believe that he doesn’t have to win Iowa — that he could take second or even third and then move on to New Hampshire, where he maintains a summer home and is considered a heavy favorite. Amid a flawed and far less financially endowed field, Romney’s staff has every reason to believe that he could effectively clinch the nomination in less than a month, after the Florida primary on Jan. 31.
There’s a far less favorable possibility, of course, and it, too, begins with the Iowa contest, which the Romney campaign views with great wariness, as if it might be some kind of sting operation. Despite the obvious rewards of going all in and delivering an early knockout blow in Iowa, Romney’s advisers do not want to risk ginning up expectations that their candidate may again fail to meet. Even worse, they fear that he will reanimate the image of him as a flip-flopper willing to tell the state’s conservatives whatever they wish to hear, which in turn will dog him into New Hampshire and beyond as it did the last time around. As Doug Gross, the 2008 Romney campaign’s Iowa chairman, told me: “He tried to be somebody he wasn’t. That’s why he lost.”
The spin Romney himself puts on his minimalist approach is that after nearly four years of nonstop campaigning, “people know me pretty well.” And yet the unintended signal sent by his narrow casting is that the less said about Mitt Romney, the better. Obama’s strategists ran an entire presidential campaign through the affecting tapestry of his own narrative. Romney — who has written two books, both scantily personal — maintains an uneasy distance from his own life story, steeped as it is in privilege, Mormonism and the murky art of political compromise. His avoidance of these subjects does not mean that they will go away, only that his opponents will have an opening to frame them as they wish.
Still, it may well be that this strategy of underwhelming force ends up fitting perfectly with a pervasive sense of disillusionment with the once-dazzling Obama. In the aftermath of failed romance with the One, perhaps the electorate will come to settle on Mitt Romney as the One Who Won’t Break Your Heart.
The unmarked three-story waterfront building at 585 Commercial Street at the base of the Charlestown Bridge in Boston’s North End seems more aptly suited for a numbers racket than for Mitt Romney’s campaign headquarters. In 2007, during Romney’s previous campaign, burglars (apparently unaffiliated politically) broke in and made off with several computers. Plans to demolish the vacant structure and replace it with condominiums were forestalled, allowing the Romneyites to move back in last year. This fall, a group of Occupy Boston protesters brought nearby traffic to a standstill but were unaware of the building’s inhabitants and left it unharassed.
The equally bleak panorama inside — grimy industrial carpet, halfhearted wall adornments and the occasional piece of paper taped to a door announcing that the person inside is in charge of “Strategy” or some such — is a testament both to a campaign’s tunnel vision and to the fact that the wealthy Romney is a rather tightfisted fellow. (For a time, he elected to save money at his PAC headquarters in Lexington by not installing land lines, even though cellphones did not work inside the building.) Particularly unkempt is the corner office on the second floor, with its clutter of unused exercise equipment, mislaid cups of espresso and a blender half-full of yesterday’s purple energy drink. Its occupant is the Romney campaign’s chief strategist, Stuart Stevens.
Stevens, a 58-year old Mississippi native (whom I have known for over a decade), is as wry, eclectic and mussed in appearance as his boss is earnest and buttoned up. Stevens has skied the North Pole, run successful campaigns in Albania and the Democratic Republic of Congo and assisted Vice President Dick Cheney in his debate preparation against John Edwards in 2004. He wrote an early episode of the hit TV series “Northern Exposure” and consulted on Hollywood projects (including the movie “The Ides of March”) with the politics junkie George Clooney, who after spending considerable time in Washington finally agreed with Stevens’s contention that it is the most sexless city in America. Though Stevens’s customary facial expression is the faintly smiling, middle-distance squint of someone lost in abstraction, he can be direct and combative in the extreme and has the reputation, as a prominent G.O.P. consultant who admires Stevens’s talent put it, of one who “does not play well with others.”
Stevens gravitates toward nonideological Republicans — his client list has included Bob Dole, Charlie Crist and another former G.O.P. governor of Massachusetts, William Weld — and hoped to run Romney’s 2002 gubernatorial campaign. But he was beaten out by Mike Murphy, an equally colorful strategist (the two dislike each other). In the summer of 2007, after defecting with his business partner, Russ Schriefer, from the McCain campaign to produce ads for the Romney team, Stevens found that he had joined an already top-heavy staff — and that Murphy, among others, had already laid out a jumble of messaging strategies. As one Romney adviser now concedes: “We brought on a lot of people because we didn’t know what we didn’t know. We were new to the national stage, and we wanted as much input and advice as we could get, and we also wanted to demonstrate to the world that we could win that invisible primary. So we had a lot of voices, and they weren’t unanimous on every point.”
Even Romney, for whom heaven is an eternal round-table discussion, came to recognize that the proliferation of highly paid consultants had reached the point of diminishing returns. This time around, he has pared down his front office. Still onboard are a few old hands; one of them, Beth Myers, told Romney that the 2008 campaign lacked a single day-to-day strategist — and that for 2012, Stuart Stevens should be that person.
Stevens and his partner, Schriefer, have instilled focus in a campaign that previously seemed a bit grasping. Gone is the weighty Romney entourage as well as the lavish ad buys, which always struck Stevens as presumptuous. (A favorite Stevens axiom: “If you don’t enter this process humbly, you will leave it humbly.”) Though he does not seem terribly intimidated by Romney’s Republican opponents — to Stevens, Rick Perry brings to mind the townies in the early scenes of “The Deer Hunter” who go loping into Vietnam expecting to kick butt — he refers to the Obama team as “the best campaign organization ever put together” and reminds his colleagues, “The only thing more intoxicating than getting elected president is the terror of losing the power of the White House. They’ll fight savagely to hang onto that power.”
Stevens devised the campaign’s refrain “Obama Isn’t Working,” with its dreary recession visuals and testimonials from the jobless posted on a Romney Web site. The strategist’s gift for withering criticism is rubbing off on his boss. Though Romney now and again employs distinctly Mitt-like language when referring to the president as a “well-intentioned” man who’s simply “out of his depth,” the candidate increasingly cleaves to the more jut-jawed message that Obama has “failed America” and doesn’t get “what makes America work” — which segues to the virtues of the übercapitalist Romney, whose new campaign slogan is “Believe in America.”
In the meantime, Stevens and other advisers have counseled Romney to ignore attacks from disapproving conservatives, like the comment made by the Baptist pastor and Perry supporter Robert Jeffress that “Mormonism is a cult.” (“Four years ago, that would have set off all sorts of alarm bells — we would have tried to mobilize our evangelical supporters to counter what Jeffress and others have been saying,” a senior staff member told me.) Romney has quietly courted key figures in the Tea Party movement since its inception two years ago: among his PAC’s first donations was one to the Congressional campaign of Michele Bachmann; he was the first major figure to endorse the current South Carolina governor, Nikki Haley; and he also gave to the losing campaigns of Sharron Angle of Nevada and Christine O’Donnell of Delaware.
But the Romney campaign has made its peace with — and in the general election may make a virtue out of — the fact that he remains despised by the far right. Among this segment is Iowa’s most prominent Tea Party activist, Ryan Rhodes, who told me that Romney’s campaign has not reached out to him and who also said, “You look at his health care plan, the fact that he hired people who lobbied for Solyndra — it takes those issues off the table that you could tie around Obama’s neck.” He went on: “I don’t think he has a major belief system. He’s Mitt Romney. He’s a manager, O.K.?”
In the past, Romney, an English major in college, was reluctant to let others put words in his mouth. But those running his campaign felt that his prose tended to accentuate Romney’s blandness and wasn’t a good use of his time. (“During the 2008 campaign,” one staff member says, snickering, “I used to tell people: ‘We’re not very happy with our speechwriter, and we want to fire him. His name’s Mitt, and he works on the third floor.’ ”) Stevens, who has made a second career out of writing dialogue for recurring TV characters, persuaded Romney to surrender the speechwriting responsibilities to him — and in recent weeks, Stevens in turn has deferred to the punchy prose of Lindsay Hayes, a former speechwriter for Sarah Palin.
Stevens has also played a hand in Romney’s much-lauded debate performances, which have buttressed the candidate’s assertion that he is best equipped to take on the rhetorically deft Obama. The previous campaign’s debate sessions were, says one adviser, “like an Economics 101 course in college, just a lot of people sitting auditorium-style with their computers.” This year’s prepping has involved fewer contributors conjuring sound bites. “All we do is argue,” says Stevens, who has coached Romney to not get entangled in the specifics of a question. Instead: Hear the topic, zone out the rest, say what you’re about, don’t get hung up on how the crowd responds. It’s not about the room. It’s about the answer.
Another Stevens maxim is “You’ve got to dig the ditch you’re going to die in” — or, less metaphorically, “You have to be willing to lose,” a slogan that he and Schriefer inscribed on a message board early on in the campaign. It’s a rousing sentiment that Romney has taken to heart in his forceful defense of the Massachusetts health care law that some admirers have begged the ex-governor to disavow. During such moments, Romney seems to project the confident air of a chief executive who spends little time fretting over what other people think.
More often, however, Mitt Romney the data-driven former corporate consultant seems like a man puzzling his way to victory, doing and saying whatever might solve the problem immediately at hand. In Iowa, I watched as the candidate confronted the dicey issue of ethanol subsidies at the Treynor business round table like a man who had no intentions of losing, dying, ditch-digging or anything else except ingratiating. First he stipulated that “I supported the subsidy of ethanol to help get the industry on its feet.” After qualifying that support by saying, “I didn’t feel the subsidy needed to go on forever,” Romney noted that the subsidy was due to expire in December anyway. He qualified that observation by remarking, “I might’ve looked at more of a decline over time. . . .” But, he cheerfully observed, “most people I know in the ethanol industry say, ‘Fine — we’re now up and going.’ ” Lest anyone doubt his commitment, Romney reminded his audience, “For me, ethanol is part of national security — it is part of America developing our own energy. . . . And I would like to see the ethanol industry continue to be successful to grow and to provide a growing share of America’s domestic energy sources.
“And how to do that,” he finished with an unsteady grin, “as Ross Perot used to say, I’m all ears!”
Among Stevens’s colorful analogies, the unlikeliest is one in which he compares Romney to Michael Vick, the dynamic quarterback of the Philadelphia Eagles. “Michael Vick’s not a real good pocket guy,” Stevens told me. “So don’t tell him he can’t roll out. Try to make him the best rollout guy that’s ever played.” And indeed, Romney’s staff has endeavored to focus the campaign on his strengths, which are decidedly the opposite of Vick’s. So instead of letting their quarterback roam and improvise, they’re keeping him tightly contained in the business-centric pocket, hoping to God that he does not stray from it.
Romney has been spending a great deal of time lately with Republicans who want to like him. On Oct. 26, he met with 61 Republican members of Congress who had either already endorsed him or were considering doing so. “The thing I try to convey to my colleagues is, ‘Mitt Romney is not going to embarrass you — he’s the most vetted candidate out there,’ ” says Representative Jason Chaffetz of Utah, who helped organize the gathering. In that sense, Romney did not disappoint. Though he devoted the bulk of his talk to the economy, he also made the point, Chaffetz says, “that in the general election he’s going to be very attractive to both Republicans and independents.”
Still, one attendee was annoyed when Romney gave a lengthy explanation for his conversion on the abortion issue and then concluded with the stilted formulation, “I come down on the side of pro-life.” The representative confronted Romney and said, “That’s not going to work with my rural voters.”
Another congressman, Darrell Issa of California, offered the former Massachusetts governor a suggestion. “Instead of always telling people this is what you’re going to do, tell them how you did it,” Issa said. “Like when you had a budget deficit and went through it line by line with each department head — that really resonates with people who go through their own budgets line by line. It’s more personal.”
Romney considered the idea, then carefully said, “I’m going to have to figure out how to do that.” Implicit in his response was that Romney’s four years dealing with the Democrat-controlled Massachusetts State Legislature — one in which the governor showed himself to be, as one adviser puts it, “a conciliator” and “a practical politician” — is a story best left for the general election. (Or avoided entirely. As another Romney campaign strategist observes, “It’s a terrible time to be running based on your experience in government.”)
Later that afternoon, Romney met with two House Republican leaders: Paul Ryan, the Budget Committee chairman, and Kevin McCarthy, the majority whip. Romney wanted to discuss Medicare reform with Ryan, who says he encouraged the candidate to “be bold, be specific and defend yourself.” The plan Romney would unveil a week later — one that allows future senior citizens to choose between traditional Medicare and a private health insurance plan — amounts to a compromise proposal that Ryan acknowledges is politically safer than his, and which he is “perfectly comfortable with.”
McCarthy also counseled boldness. “Look, no candidate ever wants to have a primary challenge, but it always makes you stronger,” the majority whip told Romney. He added, “You’ve got to have that Reagan-and-the-microphone moment.” (He was referring to the 1980 debate in which the candidate Reagan proclaimed, “I am paying for this microphone,” appearing decisive.) “People are just starving for a leader,” McCarthy said.
Hearing such stories, you get the notion that Republicans yearning for victory are calling out for something brilliant and yet unseen to burst out of Romney’s gray chrysalis. Simultaneously earthbound and, as one Republican congresswoman puts it, “a little too perfect,” Romney seems, even to himself, an ill fit for his newly chosen vocation. While trying to win over voters in New Hampshire in early 2008, he turned to an aide and said: “You know, I’ve done a lot of stuff. I’ve started companies, I ran companies, I ran the Olympics. This is by far the hardest thing I’ve ever done!” He added, laughing, “Why didn’t anybody tell me?”
The chief vulnerability of the Romney campaign resides with the understandable decision to keep their anti-Michael Vick in the pocket, thereby limiting our view of the man. Those who at close range watched Romney’s failure to close the deal in 2008 did not witness a rejection per se. Instead, it appeared that Republican voters could not quite envision this decent, clever and socially uneasy fellow governing their country — as opposed to, say, managing their stock portfolios. Stories of Romney’s wooden people skills are legion. “The Mormon’s never going to win the who-do-you-want-to-have-a-beer-with contest,” concedes one adviser, while another acknowledges, “He’s never had the experience of sitting in a bar, and like, talking.”
To his admiring subordinates, Romney is the man who, while waiting in an aide’s garage during an advertising shoot, took it upon himself to sweep it spick-and-span. He is the boss who hosted a 2008 post-mortem at his house in Belmont, Mass., and instead of demanding answers or fixing blame, passed out photo albums of the campaign for each staff member to keep. One longtime aide maintains that Romney is, no matter how much of a corporate barracuda the Democrats make him out to be, “more Richie Cunningham of ‘Happy Days’ than Gordon Gekko” of “Wall Street.” And he possesses an almost otherworldly unflappability — seen, for example, on a public street in 2009, when a detractor who recognized Romney cursed at him.“Well!” remarked Romney to a companion. “I guess somebody’s having a bad day!”
Romney’s associates maintain that his genial and humble aspect masks a voracious intellect. A longtime friend of Romney’s explained to me that a desire to digest all available viewpoints was the thread that ran through the candidate’s entire professional life. At Bain Capital, said the friend, Romney “wanted hardworking people who would challenge him — he plays devil’s advocate, trying not only to understand what you think the answer is but what your depth of thinking is.” While turning around the troubled Winter Olympics in Utah, “he brought in a management team with divergent views.” As governor, Romney “wanted a cabinet that would argue different points of view.”
The friend then hastened to assure me that Romney was, beyond all that discursiveness, a decisive leader. But as a presidential candidate, he does not always display his intellectual rigor in his policy proposals. An adviser once told me about how in 2007 Romney reacted to the news that the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, was planning on visiting ground zero during a United Nations convention. First, the candidate engaged in a debate with his foreign-policy aide, Dan Senor. Then the two men switched sides and argued opposite positions. Finally, Romney called for someone to bring him the United Nations Charter, which he read and discussed at length with Senor.
But in the end, Romney’s response to the Ahmadinejad visit was unremarkable. He released a four-sentence press statement denouncing the Iranian leader’s intentions as “shockingly audacious” and concluding that rather than “entertaining Ahmadinejad, we should be indicting him.”
I asked the campaign staff if I could talk to Romney about his economic proposals. They replied that in the interests of controlling the campaign’s message, the candidate would not be participating in any profiles or “process stories.” Instead, they suggested I speak with the campaign’s policy director, Lanhee Chen, a highly respected Harvard Ph.D., who did his best to characterize Romney’s views. The problem is that when you look beneath Mitt Romney’s critique of the Obama economy, his remedies feel a bit thin.
Asked what President Romney would have done during his first days in office, in lieu of a federal stimulus, to address the market meltdown, Chen rattled off a few likely options: “Lowering the corporate tax rate. Enacting a permanent extension of the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts. Immediately ratifying our pending trade agreements with Colombia, Panama and South Korea. In the energy sector, freeing up the necessary land to enable greater domestic production.” He did not make clear how Romney would have steered these boilerplate conservative proposals through a Democrat-controlled Congress.
I asked Chen about Romney’s recent recommendation that the National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment of the Arts be targeted for federal spending cuts. Was the candidate proposing that these two federal agencies, long opposed by conservative groups, be eliminated altogether? “We haven’t specifically discussed that,” Chen said.
These programs had a combined annual budget of less than $500 million. Meanwhile, Romney previously criticized President George W. Bush’s Medicare Part D prescription-drug program for its exorbitant cost — “the actual balance-sheet impact . . . [is] now estimated to be approximately $8 trillion,” he wrote. Had Romney discussed repealing the pricey entitlement? “It was not under consideration,” Chen replied.
Romney’s policy director had thorough responses to about half of my inquiries. He didn’t know if the candidate’s heavy criticism of Obama’s “green jobs” initiatives meant that Romney was skeptical of a green-jobs industry on its face. He didn’t know what exemptions Romney would eliminate in pursuit of a flatter tax code. Asked if Romney agreed with Michele Bachmann’s sentiment that every adult American should pay taxes, Chen replied, “I don’t have anything for you there.” Finally, I asked for clarification of a remark I heard Romney make on the campaign trail in western Iowa: “You cannot have a strong economy without strong families and strong values.” While I could appreciate how that sentiment would appeal to Iowa’s social conservatives, the logic wasn’t especially clear.
“You know, it’s a general comment on the importance that strong families have in our country’s economic strength,” Chen said. He recalled that Romney expanded on the topic at the Values Voters Summit a few weeks back and referred me to the speech.
Here is what it says on the subject: “The foundation needed for a strong economy and a strong military is a people of strong values.”
Romney’s newest book, “No Apology,” similarly represents how the candidate’s intellectual vigor gives ground to political calibrations. Romney decided to write the book immediately after bowing out of the race in February 2008. “I can live with everything that happened in the campaign,” he told aides. What frustrated him was his inability to articulate a vision for the country. Two advisers recall a meeting in the summer of 2008 at which Romney cited as a literary inspiration a book that had been on his mind, about the decline of France following the mass protests of the 1960s — and then proceeded to translate it aloud from French.
While touring the country raising funds for Republican candidates that summer, Romney also pored over texts from British leftists arguing why America’s decline as a superpower should be welcomed. He told aides to thrash out big ideas for the book, and he envisioned gathering roomfuls of experts. After first hiring a ghostwriter, Romney then decided that he would prefer to write it himself. He spent most of the first half of 2009 at his new home in La Jolla, Calif., typing away on his laptop while e-mailing his researcher for details on radical Islam and the fall of the Roman Empire.
For those political insiders who had been hearing murmurs that Romney was intending to write a “Tom Friedman-esque” book, it came as something of a surprise to read “No Apology” — a data-packed but mostly familiar defense of American exceptionalism that, as the title indicates, also devotes ample space to condemning President Obama’s supposed tendency to apologize on the world stage for America’s moral lapses. Where Romney’s book strikes an unusual chord, for a politician anyway, is in its frank recognition that for innovation to thrive, governments must stand back and allow the “creative destruction” of obsolete industries — and the jobs they produce. Readers will recognize in such passages the brisk realism of Mitt Romney, corporate consultant.
Squaring such sentiments with the Mitt Romney who won the Michigan primary in January 2008 is more vexing. More than one adviser told me that Michigan was where Romney “found his voice” — an odd claim, given the widespread view at the time that the primary featured Mitt Romney at his most pandering. While the front-runner, McCain, delivered “straight talk” that some industries in Michigan were unlikely to be rejuvenated and that worker retraining was the more prudent course than trying to “recreate the past” — an argument for creative destruction — Romney labeled his opponent a defeatist and sunnily pledged “to fight for every single job.” (Ten months later, Romney returned to his Bain mind-set and wrote an Op-Ed in The New York Times titled, “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt [ http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/19/opinion/19romney.html (next item below)].”)
Another side of Mitt Romney is ever-so-briefly revealed in “No Apology” — that of a former lay pastor, or “stake president,” at his Mormon church in Boston. Serving in that capacity, Romney wrote, “I cannot count the number of times I consoled or counseled a person who had lost a job.” In a couple of short but moving paragraphs, the author recites a few such poignant moments before concluding, “Ever since these experiences, unemployment is not merely a statistic for me.” Sheryl Gay Stolberg independently confirmed Romney’s counseling interactions in an article in this paper [ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/16/us/politics/for-romney-a-role-of-faith-and-authority.html (second item below)]. But Romney refused to be interviewed on the subject, and his campaign staff also declined to assist Stolberg, just as my inquiries on his time as Mormon stake president were, unlike my queries on other subjects, met with silence.
“He’s probably taken it off the table because he feels that the downside of bringing up his Mormon leadership responsibility is greater than his upside,” says Doug Cropper, a Romney supporter and Mormon bishop in Davenport, Iowa. “And I understand it.”
The unintended consequence is that it leaves less of Mitt Romney to understand — and, correspondingly, more room for doubt.
It’s very unlikely that we’ll ever hear Mitt Romney and Barack Obama openly discuss the things they have in common. Nonetheless, we may well see in the general election a contest between two dispassionate and accommodating pragmatists and skilled debaters who relish intellectual give-and-take, and whose willingness to compromise has infuriated the party faithful. Both have promised change. Each will frame the other as being not up to the task.
How ably Romney the nominee will defend himself, given the kid-gloves treatment by his current competition and the campaign’s avoidance of large segments of his own life story, is difficult to say just yet. In early November I watched Romney return to Iowa for only the fourth time. He stopped in Dubuque and Davenport and, before decent-size crowds, essentially regurgitated his address on the economy from the week before. In both cases he spoke for less than 20 minutes and did not take questions from the audience. Far more of his ground time was devoted to filming promotional material in a Dubuque sheet-metal factory, where the footage would capture the candidate seeming engaged in the kind of heart-to-heart dialogues with working-class Americans that the campaign had otherwise left off his schedule that day.
Near the end of his talk in Davenport, he said to the 275 east Iowans in attendance, “I want you to get to know me a little better.” After wrapping up his speech, he moved briskly through the crowd, pausing now and then to take photos and sign autographs, before flying out of Iowa with Stuart Stevens and a couple of other staff members.
The following morning in Des Moines, I met with Romney’s former Iowa chairman, Doug Gross. The strategist recalled how he had gotten off to a rocky start with the Romneys when he first traveled to Boston to meet them in the spring of 2007. That day, Gross brought up Romney’s potential liabilities in Iowa — including his previously progressive stances on abortion and gays, along with his Mormon faith — and warned that he would have to prove that he could relate to average voters. According to Gross (and confirmed by someone else who was there): “He got mad, his wife stormed out and he never talked to me the rest of the night. They found it insulting.”
Romney nonetheless hired Gross, who believes that the results of that 2008 campaign vindicated his initial concerns. Despite being asked to rejoin the campaign this year, he has not done so. I asked him if he had any reservations as to whether Mitt Romney would be a good president.
“Yeah,” he immediately replied. “That’s why I haven’t committed. To be an excellent president — part of the rap on Mitt is that he’s too flexible. I see that as a good thing, because it shows he’s willing to be pragmatic and do what works.
“But,” added Mitt Romney’s former Iowa chairman, “I don’t know if he’s got the gut instinct to make the right call at the right time. I don’t know yet.”
Robert Draper is a contributing writer for the magazine. He is working on a book about the House of Representatives.
Editor: Ilena Silverman
© 2011 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/04/magazine/mitt-romney-bot.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/04/magazine/mitt-romney-bot.html?pagewanted=all ] [with comments]
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Let Detroit Go Bankrupt
Ronald J. Cala II
By MITT ROMNEY
Published: November 18, 2008
Boston
IF General Motors, Ford and Chrysler get the bailout that their chief executives asked for yesterday, you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye. It won’t go overnight, but its demise will be virtually guaranteed.
Without that bailout, Detroit will need to drastically restructure itself. With it, the automakers will stay the course — the suicidal course of declining market shares, insurmountable labor and retiree burdens, technology atrophy, product inferiority and never-ending job losses. Detroit needs a turnaround, not a check.
I love cars, American cars. I was born in Detroit, the son of an auto chief executive. In 1954, my dad, George Romney, was tapped to run American Motors when its president suddenly died. The company itself was on life support — banks were threatening to deal it a death blow. The stock collapsed. I watched Dad work to turn the company around — and years later at business school, they were still talking about it. From the lessons of that turnaround, and from my own experiences, I have several prescriptions for Detroit’s automakers.
First, their huge disadvantage in costs relative to foreign brands must be eliminated. That means new labor agreements to align pay and benefits to match those of workers at competitors like BMW, Honda, Nissan and Toyota. Furthermore, retiree benefits must be reduced so that the total burden per auto for domestic makers is not higher than that of foreign producers.
That extra burden is estimated to be more than $2,000 per car. Think what that means: Ford, for example, needs to cut $2,000 worth of features and quality out of its Taurus to compete with Toyota’s Avalon. Of course the Avalon feels like a better product — it has $2,000 more put into it. Considering this disadvantage, Detroit has done a remarkable job of designing and engineering its cars. But if this cost penalty persists, any bailout will only delay the inevitable.
Second, management as is must go. New faces should be recruited from unrelated industries — from companies widely respected for excellence in marketing, innovation, creativity and labor relations.
The new management must work with labor leaders to see that the enmity between labor and management comes to an end. This division is a holdover from the early years of the last century, when unions brought workers job security and better wages and benefits. But as Walter Reuther, the former head of the United Automobile Workers, said to my father, “Getting more and more pay for less and less work is a dead-end street.”
You don’t have to look far for industries with unions that went down that road. Companies in the 21st century cannot perpetuate the destructive labor relations of the 20th. This will mean a new direction for the U.A.W., profit sharing or stock grants to all employees and a change in Big Three management culture.
The need for collaboration will mean accepting sanity in salaries and perks. At American Motors, my dad cut his pay and that of his executive team, he bought stock in the company, and he went out to factories to talk to workers directly. Get rid of the planes, the executive dining rooms — all the symbols that breed resentment among the hundreds of thousands who will also be sacrificing to keep the companies afloat.
Investments must be made for the future. No more focus on quarterly earnings or the kind of short-term stock appreciation that means quick riches for executives with options. Manage with an eye on cash flow, balance sheets and long-term appreciation. Invest in truly competitive products and innovative technologies — especially fuel-saving designs — that may not arrive for years. Starving research and development is like eating the seed corn.
Just as important to the future of American carmakers is the sales force. When sales are down, you don’t want to lose the only people who can get them to grow. So don’t fire the best dealers, and don’t crush them with new financial or performance demands they can’t meet.
It is not wrong to ask for government help, but the automakers should come up with a win-win proposition. I believe the federal government should invest substantially more in basic research — on new energy sources, fuel-economy technology, materials science and the like — that will ultimately benefit the automotive industry, along with many others. I believe Washington should raise energy research spending to $20 billion a year, from the $4 billion that is spent today. The research could be done at universities, at research labs and even through public-private collaboration. The federal government should also rectify the imbedded tax penalties that favor foreign carmakers.
But don’t ask Washington to give shareholders and bondholders a free pass — they bet on management and they lost.
The American auto industry is vital to our national interest as an employer and as a hub for manufacturing. A managed bankruptcy may be the only path to the fundamental restructuring the industry needs. It would permit the companies to shed excess labor, pension and real estate costs. The federal government should provide guarantees for post-bankruptcy financing and assure car buyers that their warranties are not at risk.
In a managed bankruptcy, the federal government would propel newly competitive and viable automakers, rather than seal their fate with a bailout check.
Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, was a candidate for this year’s Republican presidential nomination.
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/19/opinion/19romney.html [comments at http://community.nytimes.com/article/comments/2008/11/19/opinion/19romney.html ]
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For Romney, a Role of Faith and Authority
The Mormon Temple in Belmont, Mass. When initial plans in 1996 called for a larger structure, incensed neighbors filed suit. Mitt Romney tried to smooth relations between the church and the town.
Evan McGlinn for The New York Times
Mitt Romney was a Mormon leader before politics.
Boston Globe
Bryce Clark said Mr. Romney was a thoughtful and compassionate leader.
Michael Friberg for The New York Times
Judy Dushku had a different take on Mr. Romney's leadership and said she she saw hypocrisy and callousness.
Evan McGlinn for The New York Times
By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG
Published: October 15, 2011
BELMONT, Mass. — In ticking off his credentials on the campaign trail — management consultant, businessman, governor — Mitt Romney omits what may have been his most distinctive post: Mormon lay leader, offering pastoral guidance on all manner of human affairs from marriage to divorce, abortion, adoption, addiction, unemployment and even business disputes.
Bryce Clark was a recipient of Mr. Romney’s spiritual advice. Late one summer night in 1993, distraught over his descent into alcoholism and drug use, Mr. Clark, then a 19-year-old college student, decided to confess that he had strayed from his Mormon faith. So he drove through this well-heeled Boston suburb to Mr. Romney’s secluded seven-bedroom home.
As the highest-ranking Mormon leader in Boston, Mr. Romney was responsible for determining whether Mr. Clark was spiritually fit for a mission, a rite of passage for young Mormon men. Mr. Clark had previously lied to him, insisting that he was eligible to go. But instead of condemnation that night, Mr. Clark said, Mr. Romney offered counsel that the younger man has clung to for years.
“He told me that, as human beings, our work isn’t measured by taking the sum of our good deeds and the sum of our bad deeds and seeing how things even out,” recalled Mr. Clark, now 37, sober and working as a filmmaker in Utah. “He said, ‘The only thing you need to think about is: Are you trying to improve, are you trying to do better? And if you are, then you’re a saint.’ ”
That encounter with Mr. Clark provides a rare glimpse into the way Mr. Romney — now a Republican candidate for president — expresses his faith and exercised authority as a religious leader. From 1981 through 1994, he was a powerful figure in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which is run almost entirely by volunteers beyond its headquarters in Salt Lake City.
First as bishop of his own congregation, and later as Boston “stake president,” overseeing a region akin to a Roman Catholic diocese, he operated as clergyman, organization man and defender of the faith, guiding the church through a tumultuous period of rapid growth.
He confronted anti-Mormon sentiment and management challenges, supervising youth programs, the church’s social welfare system, missionary training and outreach to Hispanic, Portuguese and Southeast Asian converts, including Cambodian and Laotian refugees whose teenagers were joining the church in droves.
Later, when his official duties were complete, he contributed handsomely to the construction of the grand — and controversial — Boston Temple, high on a hilltop in Belmont, its steeple topped by a golden angel, just minutes from the Romney home. “Mitt’s Temple,” some local residents called it derisively.
Some Mormons, like Mr. Clark, found Mr. Romney thoughtful and compassionate; one mother recalled his kindness to her dying son. Others, including a group of Mormon feminists demanding a greater role for women, found him condescending, doctrinaire or just plain bossy. He clashed with a married mother of four who sought to terminate a pregnancy; the incident made news years later, when Mr. Romney ran for United States Senate as a supporter of abortion rights — a position he has since abandoned.
“Mitt is the type who liked to be called Bishop Romney or President Romney,” said Judy Dushku, a professor of government at Suffolk University in Boston and a Mormon feminist leader. “He is very conscious of his place in the hierarchy, but not yours.”
Mr. Romney declined to be interviewed for this article. Facing a primary electorate in which Christian conservatives are a powerful force, he is trying to keep his religion from becoming a barrier to his election. When his faith has become an issue — a Texas pastor supporting a rival candidate recently proclaimed Mormonism “a cult” — Mr. Romney has not offered a full-throated defense, but instead called for civility.
But here in Belmont, where Mormons estimate their population at 500 in a town of 25,000, Mr. Romney’s fellow congregants, many of them professionals and academics, are accustomed to hearing him talk of his beliefs. Mr. Romney has traded his large home for a townhouse; just a few months ago, he stepped to the lectern during a Sunday service to deliver what Tony Kimball, a retired professor of government, called a “traditional Mormon testimony,” in which he proclaimed his faith in Jesus as his savior.
Mr. Kimball, a close aide when Mr. Romney was stake president, says culture, rather than political calculus, may keep candidate Romney from talking about faith. “It’s kind of considered bad form by a lot of Mormons to wear it on your lapel,” he said, “and Mitt is not that way.”
Deep Church Roots
Mr. Romney has an impeccable Mormon pedigree. His family traces its church lineage to 1837; a great-great-grandfather, Miles Romney, began following the first Mormon prophet, Joseph Smith, that year, and later trekked to Utah with the early Mormon pioneers. As son of one of the nation’s most prominent Mormons — George W. Romney, a former Michigan governor and presidential candidate — Mitt Romney seemed destined for a prominent position in the church.
In 1971, Mr. Romney arrived in Boston to attend a joint program at the Harvard Business and Law Schools. He had completed a Mormon mission in France, graduated from Brigham Young University and was already married with a son. On weekends, he and other young Mormons would take overnight bus trips to the nearest Mormon temple, outside Washington, to perform sacred rituals, like baptism for the dead.
“Most of us would yak or sleep on the bus, or read a book,” recalled one of the participants, Helen Claire Sievers. “Mitt was always working.”
It was an early hint of the intensity and business acumen that would make Mr. Romney rich as the founder of Bain Capital, a Boston-based private equity firm. He used those same skills, in salesmanship, deal making, organization, networking and public relations, as a steward of the church.
He was highly motivated and “hands-on,” said Philip Barlow, a professor at Utah State University, who as a graduate student was one of Mr. Romney’s top aides as bishop. If somebody’s roof leaked, Mr. Romney would show up with a ladder to fix it. Mr. Barlow remembers Mr. Romney picking butternut squash and yanking weeds on the church’s communal farm.
When young Southeast Asian converts began joining gangs, Mr. Romney set up small storefront churches in rough areas of town, with the hope of drawing them back. When the approach did not work, he shut the branches down. Every other Sunday, he convened his high council — akin to a president’s cabinet — to discuss operational matters.
“He would run it like a business, and he would listen to us,” said Mick Watson, a Brandeis University graduate school dean and one of the councilors. “But Mitt, of course, was in charge — he was always in charge.”
That take-charge attitude sometimes rankled in a setting where people yearned for consensus.
Ron Scott, a journalist and Mormon who has written a forthcoming biography of Mr. Romney, remembered how, when he moved to Boston, Mr. Romney asked him to run public affairs for the church — and then proceeded to tell him precisely how to do the job. “He had more of an imperious approach,” Mr. Scott said. “He wanted to direct everything.”
Yet he proved himself an effective salesman for his faith. Shortly after he became bishop, at age 34, with five young sons, the church announced plans for a new meetinghouse in Belmont, on a wooded, 14-acre plot. Townspeople were suspicious. “The tenor was, ‘The Mormons are moving in,’ ” said Grant Bennett, who succeeded Mr. Romney as bishop. In 1984, with the construction almost complete, the meetinghouse burned down. Officials suspected arson.
Soon Mr. Romney was flooded with offers from other churches wanting to lend their buildings. Sensing an opportunity to strengthen community ties, he accepted them all, and the Mormons of Belmont rotated from one house of worship to another for a year while theirs was being rebuilt.
It was not the last time Mr. Romney would try to smooth church-town relations. In 1996, church leaders in Salt Lake announced plans for a granite temple — 94,000 square feet with six soaring spires — on a hilltop adjacent to the Belmont meetinghouse. (Unlike Mormon meetinghouses, Mormon temples are reserved for sacred ceremonies, and non-Mormons may step no farther than the lobby.) Incensed neighbors filed suit.
Mr. Romney, fearing he would become a lightning rod after his Senate loss to Edward M. Kennedy in 1994, kept a relatively low profile. He and his wife, Ann, hosted meetings in their home so the neighbors could meet the architects, and perhaps sort their differences out. He spoke in favor of the project at a public hearing. His tithe — Mormons are expected to give the church 10 percent of their income — helped foot the $30 million bill.
But mostly, said Scott Ferson, a public relations executive (and former Kennedy aide) who helped calm tensions, Mr. Romney functioned as high-level adviser, a liaison between Boston and Salt Lake. The project was eventually built, albeit on a smaller scale.
“He was kind of a Big Mormon,” Mr. Ferson said of Mr. Romney. “A lot of people would say, ‘Let’s see what Mitt thinks.’ ”
Hewing the Line
As a Senate candidate, Mr. Romney angered higher-ups in Salt Lake with his independent stance on abortion; he said that he was personally opposed, but favored laws allowing women to choose. But earlier as a church leader, he hewed much more closely to the official Mormon view.
Mormons oppose abortion, except in extreme cases like rape, incest or where the life of the woman is in danger — and require that church elders be consulted. In 1990, Exponent II, a Mormon feminist magazine that Ms. Dushku, the Suffolk University professor, helped found, published an article by a married mother of four who recounted her own experience after doctors advised her to terminate her pregnancy when she was being treated for a potentially dangerous blood clot.
Her bishop got wind of the situation, she wrote, and showed up unannounced at the hospital, warning her sternly not to go forward. The article did not identify Mr. Romney as the bishop, but Ms. Dushku later did.
Now the woman has come forward, identifying herself in Mr. Scott’s book as Carrel Hilton Sheldon. (Through Ms. Dushku, she declined to be interviewed.) “Mitt has many, many winning qualities,” she is quoted as saying, “but at the time he was blind to me as a human being.”
Ms. Dushku sees hypocrisy and callousness; Mr. Scott sees inexperience.
“I don’t think he’s an evil, unfeeling, uncaring kind of guy,” Mr. Scott said. “He was a brand new bishop, he was pretty young to begin with, my sense is he was pretty full of himself, and he thought that he would not fulfill his obligation as bishop if he didn’t press the matter.”
But if Mr. Romney was blind in that instance, his time as an ecclesiastical leader may have also opened his eyes. Having been raised in wealth and privilege, he was now exposed to hardship and human suffering, especially among Boston’s immigrant populations. “I had no idea people lived this way,” Mr. Barlow recalls him saying.
A Reserved Demeanor
Ted Oparowski, a retired firefighter, and his wife, Pat, a secretary, still praise Mr. Romney for ministering to their 14-year-old son, David, who was dying of cancer three decades ago.
The boy, upon hearing that Mr. Romney was a lawyer, asked him to help draft a will, so that he might leave something to each of his friends. Mr. Romney pulled out a legal pad, and together they wrote one up. Later, he gave the eulogy at the boy’s funeral.
If Mr. Romney, who no longer holds an official church title, seems overly polished or wooden on the campaign trail, his defenders say that is just how he is, reserved yet caring. “He’s always been that way, that’s his demeanor,” Mrs. Oparowski said.
Because the church imposes such heavy volunteer obligations on its members, much of Mr. Romney’s work involved functioning as a cheerleader to keep things up and running. When a congregant asked to be released from his church duties during a difficult divorce, Mr. Romney said no; he did not want to send a message that divorced people could not serve.
When Clayton Christensen, a Harvard business professor, and his wife, Christine, felt overwhelmed by church obligations, Mr. Romney showed up unexpectedly at the door. With three young children, Mr. Christensen was in charge of missionary work; his wife ran the relief society, ministering to Boston’s poor.
“He said, ‘I was just driving home from work, and I had a feeling that I needed to stop by and tell you that God loves you.’ ” Mr. Christensen was so moved, he recalled, that he wept.
On the night in 1993 that Mr. Clark, the filmmaker, arrived at the Romney home here, Mr. Romney greeted him in a white business shirt, dress slacks and bedroom slippers. He was waiting at the door; the young man’s parents had called ahead.
The Clarks and the Romneys had been close for years — Mr. Clark’s father, Kim, now president of Brigham Young University’s campus in Rexburg, Idaho, was then dean of the Harvard Business School — and Mr. Romney had been the family’s “home teacher.” For nearly a decade, he made monthly visits to the Clark home, checking on the family’s welfare and serving up Gospel lessons to the seven Clark children.
The Romney house, Mr. Clark remembers, was quiet. Mr. Romney ushered him into the library, and they spoke for more than an hour. “He talked a lot about the Savior, and what the atonement means,” Mr. Clark said. “He said, ‘I just want you to know you are not alone.’ ”
In the months and years that followed, Mr. Romney wrote the young man notes of encouragement, frequently reminding him of what he had said that summer night, about always “trying to improve.” Mr. Clark says he still has them.
Kitty Bennett contributed research.
*
Related
For Romney, Social Issues Pose New Test (October 9, 2011)
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/09/us/politics/social-issues-pose-new-test-for-mitt-romney.html
First: Asking Candidates Tougher Questions About Faith (August 28, 2011)
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/28/magazine/asking-candidates-tougher-questions-about-faith.html
What Is It About Mormonism? (January 6, 2008)
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/magazine/06mormonism-t.html
Related in Opinion
Room For Debate: Are Republicans Ready Now for a Mormon President?
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2011/07/04/are-republicans-ready-now-for-a-mormon-president
*
© 2011 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/16/us/politics/for-romney-a-role-of-faith-and-authority.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/16/us/politics/for-romney-a-role-of-faith-and-authority.html?pagewanted=all ]
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Greensburg, KS - 5/4/07
"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
from John Philpot Curran, Speech
upon the Right of Election, 1790
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